Right atrial thrombus mimicking cardiac tumor in a neonate.

Does the cardiac mass should be operated in neonates? When diagnosis of cardiac tumor or mass has been made, the surgical excision should not be delayed for prevention of life-treating complications.

The influence of reading expertise in mirror-letter perception: Evidence from beginning and expert readers.

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate letters and words. Therefore, it is supposed that this unlearning process takes place in a gradual way and that reading expertise modulates mirror-letter discrimination.

Differential sensitivity of letters, numbers, and symbols to character transpositions.

This study was designed to explore whether the human visual system has different degrees of tolerance to character position changes for letter strings, digit strings, and symbol strings. An explicit perceptual matching task was used (same-different judgment), and participants' electrophysiological activity was recorded. Materials included trials in which the referent stimulus and the target stimulus were identical or differed either by two character replacements or by transposing two characters.

Two words, one meaning: evidence of automatic co-activation of translation equivalents.

Research on the processing of translations offers important insights on how bilinguals negotiate the representation of words from two languages in one mind and one brain. Evidence so far has shown that translation equivalents effectively activate each other as well as their shared concept even when translations lack of any formal overlap (i.e.

Transliteration and transcription effects in biscriptal readers: the case of Greeklish.

In order to overcome limitations associated with script incompatibilities Greek users of the Internet have developed Greeklish, a transliterated version of Modern Greek using Roman characters. The representational status of this artificial writing system was examined in two masked priming lexical decision experiments using Greeklish primes with different degrees of graphemic overlap with their corresponding Greek targets. Results suggested that Greeklish primes were effectively processed and transliterated to their Greek counterparts.

Masked translation priming effects with low proficient bilinguals.

Non-cognate masked translation priming lexical decision studies with unbalanced bilinguals suggest that masked translation priming effects are asymmetric as a function of the translation direction (significant effects only in the dominant [L1] to nondominant [L2] language translation direction). However, in contrast to the predictions of most current accounts of masked translation priming effects, bidirectional effects have recently been reported with a group of low proficient bilinguals Duyck & Warlop 2009 (Experimental Psychology 56:173-179). In a series of masked translation priming lexical decision experiments we examined whether the same pattern of effects would emerge with late and low proficient Greek (L1)-Spanish (L2) bilinguals.

Electrophysiological correlates of the masked translation priming effect with highly proficient simultaneous bilinguals.

In the present study, we examined whether there is a symmetrical masked translation priming effect for non-cognate words in a group of highly proficient (native-like) Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilinguals using event-related brain potentials. Participants were presented with a set of Spanish and Basque words that could be preceded by their repetitions (an identity condition), their translations in the other language, or by two unrelated words (one in each language). Results showed a significant masked repetition effect for Spanish as well as for Basque targets, mainly evident in the N250 and N400 components.

Influence of prime lexicality, frequency, and pronounceability on the masked onset priming effect.

The present study investigates the origins of the masked onset priming effect (MOPE). There are two alternative interpretations that account for most of the evidence reported on the MOPE, so far. The speech planning account (SP) identifies the locus of the MOPE in the preparation of the speech response.

Subtitle-based word frequencies as the best estimate of reading behavior: the case of greek.

Previous evidence has shown that word frequencies calculated from corpora based on film and television subtitles can readily account for reading performance, since the language used in subtitles greatly approximates everyday language. The present study examines this issue in a society with increased exposure to subtitle reading. We compiled SUBTLEX-GR, a subtitled-based corpus consisting of more than 27 million Modern Greek words, and tested to what extent subtitle-based frequency estimates and those taken from a written corpus of Modern Greek account for the lexical decision performance of young Greek adults who are exposed to subtitle reading on a daily basis.

A standardized set of 260 pictures for Modern Greek: norms for name agreement, age of acquisition, and visual complexity.

The appropriate selection of both pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli requires a previous language-specific standardization process of the materials across different variables. Considering that such normative data have not yet been collected for Modern Greek, in this study normative data for the color version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois, 2004) were collected from 330 native Greek adults. Participants named the pictures (providing name agreement ratings) and rated them for visual complexity and age of acquisition.

Learning of a T-maze by rat pups when contact with the mother is either permitted or denied.

Mother-pup interactions constitute an important component of environmental stimulation of the offspring during the neonatal period. Employing maternal contact as either a positive reinforcer or, its denial, as a frustrative, non-rewarding stimulus, we developed a novel experimental paradigm involving learning by rat neonates of a T-maze. When trained under the reward of maternal contact during postnatal days 10-13 Wistar rat pups learned the choice leading to the mother in a T-maze.